SpeedBall 2
Speedball 2 is what you might get if you crossed football, hockey, kickboxing, and street gangs. It's a brutal sport pitting two teams of hulking meat men against one another. Scoring goals is just as valuable as knocking out other players, and true to the game's name, matches are quick, taking only a few minutes. Yet as breezy as Speedball 2 may seem at first, there is a welcome modicum of depth lurking just beneath the surface. There are only two objectives to concern yourself with in Speedball 2: pound your opponents to a blood pulp or score incredible goals. And those two intuitive aspirations are handled by a streamlined control scheme without any fluff. Ready to mash heads? Then get to it! When you have the ball, the action button passes it in the direction you're facing, and when you don't have possession, the button triggers a slide tackle, which you can use to steadily beat down the other team. Knocking out enemy players is rewarded with just as many points as scoring goals, which is probably why you're never given the ability to choose which speedballer you control. If you could, it wouldn't be long before the game turned into a poor man's brawler. Even so, passing the ball to enemy players before slide-tackling them is not only an acceptable tactic, but one of the best around. It guarantees hits, and if you're really aggressive, you never even have to try to score. Instead, you can just force opponents to flip through their substitute players, gradually weakening their team. On the sides of the pitch there are ramps that accelerate the ball in certain directions, but they also act as score multipliers. If you can push the ball through once, you receive a 50 percent boost to all points you score--knockouts, goals, bumper hits--and if you can manage two shots, then you receive double points. Winning matches nets you cash over time, which helps you build and refine your team, but after a certain point, most of your players are much stronger than anyone else's, and games become absurdly easy. While my first few matches had scores that were pretty close, after season three, I would regularly shut out the other teams and score hundreds of points, until I progressed far enough to play in the Intergalactic Cup. Speedball 2 is quite a bit deeper than you may initially suspect, and the enjoyable career mode's sense of progression is enough to keep you pushing onward. Without an online or even a LAN option, though, the bare-bones multiplayer limits the competitive thrills, and you can't bring in your team from the career mode and pit them against your friends' teams, which is shame. Instead, Speedball teaches you how to play and sets you loose, but leaves you with only a handful of avenues to explore the possibilities. THE GOOD ++Winning games via knockouts is wonderfully satisfying +Fairly robust team managment +Ramps and others obstacles open entertaining possiblitties THE BAD --Menu problems, game lock-ups, and other bugs -Too few ways to play with others 6.9 average